Western Kansas world. [volume] (WaKeeney, Kan.) 1885-current, 1887-08-06
Timber . sansf'sg.

xsUsOcT S01sttnG.
I have always felt that, since farming is
business, the plainest business princi-
pies require that the capital invested
should be kept undiminished. Land is not,
like the capital invested in manufactures
and-commerce. easily replaced. No man
created or could create the soil, and no
man has right to destroy its fertility.
That is the heritage of the generations to
come. Each generation has right to use,
but not destroy or even diminish it. The
forests were q part Of the original capital
Of our farms in Ohio. OF course, it was
necessary to destroy q considerable por-
ton of these to give SPACE for crops and
tillage. am ne believer in the doctrine
that it is wrong to harvest the timber when
it is grown and ripe, and the land is needed
for agriculture. But there has been need.
less waste, and too much Of our land has
been cleared of its forests. Our climate
is more severe in heat and cold, food and
dreuth, wind and hurricane than fifty years
ago. I remember when peaches grew
yearly in abundance all over Ohio, while
now they grow almost never, except in .
few favored localities. If we had cleared
only 60 or 20 per sent. of the land and
titled it better, and lef. at least 80 per cent.
in solid forest, We should have been far
richer both in cash and climate to-day. In
the older parts of Ohio we have scarcely
10 per cent. of the land in real solid for
est, and it becomes US to study how we
may regain some of the climatic benefits
lost with the destruction Of the forests. I
do not think timber planting for simple
timber growth, or even the saving of old
forests, will pay under our present rates Of
interest and methods of taxation, on land
worth $75 to 800 per acre. But we can
gain the climatic effects, without loss of
the use of the land. Orchards, sugar
camps, roadside trees, and cultivated crops
like corn and potatoes in rotation with
wheat and clover, will together help to
break the fierce winds, absorb rainfall,
retard excessive evaporation, equalize tenn
perature, invite seasonAble precipitation Of
rain, and help to prevent drouths, floods,
and tornadoes.. Especially is this true OF
sugar camps and apple orchards, dense
with the soil kept loose in the maple grove
by the leaves, ed in the orchard by occa-
sional cultivation and cropping and new
seeding to clover.
I have always felt that each farmer
ought, in some way, to do his fair share
toward restoring the valuable climatic eff
fects of the forests that have been de.
stroyed; and so on my own farm of i26
acres I have saved about fourteen acres Of
maple grove, and have planted some four
teen acres of apple orchard, and some two
hundred roadside naples, and have, in all,
nearly fifty acres systematically tile
drained, and about seventy acres under
tillage and rotation. The orchard will
henceforth be it's own windbreak, and will
protect the dwelling house and the rest of
the farm from north and west winds, while
the maple grove answers all the climatic
effects of regular forest of the same
area, and both orchard and maple grove
yield as much net income per acre an
nually as average farm land. know that
the ownership of land is considered abso-
lutte in the United States, and each farmer
thinks he has perfect right to cut down
every tree, and not replant, and to exhaust
his soil as much as he will without return,
and is FESTIVE under, or rather resents. any
Of control. But could never
feel it to be right for each or any to pursue
a-course that would be harmful or even
ruinous if pursued by all, and have regu-
lated my conduct accordingly.-Ohio Cor.
COuntTU Gentleman